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Maven Creative shapes 50,000 sq ft of brand for Colossal’s Dallas HQ
Maven Creative's extensive design work for Colossal's Dallas headquarters illustrates the importance of integrating brand strategy with physical space to create an immersive experience. By using environmental graphics and wayfinding as narrative devices, the project emphasizes the need for brands to communicate their identity and mission through every aspect of their environment, fostering a sense of belonging for employees and visitors alike.
The Brand Identity: Maven Creative’s work on Colossal’s Dallas headquarters spans almost 50,000 square feet. Environmental graphics, wayfinding, murals, LED content, projection mapping, print and interior direction – Maven shaped them all in partnership with Colossal CEO Ben Lamm and his in-house team. The project is the output of a relationship that’s more than a decade old, and marks the first time the Orlando-based creative agency has worked on a space with Lamm. The brief arrived as a point of view rather than a fixed set of parameters.
“Most of our briefs come directly from Ben,” Maven’s Design Director Sean Jones tells us, “ they are an ambition for what something could be.” From there, the studio’s job was to take the broad strokes and turn them into walls, screens, surfaces and shelves.
It started as creative direction for external collaborators, but expanded into co-direction of the entire build, with Maven embedded alongside the architect, contractors and vendors as decisions were made. The conceptual frame that Maven and Lamm have worked with since developing Colossal’s identity in 2020 is what Jones describes as the balance between “MIT and MTV” – cutting-edge science made cultural and accessible, a biosciences company positioned as a global movement.
“Whether you’re a new employee or a high-stakes investor, the goal was for you to walk in and immediately feel part of something bigger,” Jones explains. Wayfinding was the device through which much of this gets delivered, though Maven did not treat it as a separate layer. Walls, floors and ceilings became part of the system, and visitors move through a deliberate sequence – from Colossal’s vision and mission into progressively more advanced scientific environments.
The intent, as Senior Designer Marina Kozak puts it, is that “you’re never just navigating the space, you’re learning as you move through it.” The clearest expression of that thinking is the use of de-extinct species as spatial anchors. Each common workspace is tied to a species Colossal is actively working on, which informed environmental graphics, naming and thematic cues throughout the area. It gives the system a flexible but consistent framework, and turns navigation into narrative. Layered over the architectural cues is what Maven calls Colossal’s “tech HUD” visual system – the digital language that bridges brand and environment.
It governs how information is structured and displayed across LED nano glass, large-format screens and projection mapping, translating the scientific platform into something legible in three dimensions. Kozak describes the working approach as a speculative UX one, which gave the team license to ask what every wall and window would look like as a screen displaying moving data. Familiar interface elements like menu bars and buttons are used as spatial devices, pulling the viewer in through touchpoints they know how to read. Typography across the space utilises Colossal’s two existing brand fonts: NB Architekt and PP Telegraf.
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